CORDOVA, Alaska — Dune Lankard piloted the gleaming gill-net fishing boat to Simpson Bay, where eight buoys bobbed in the sunlight. The bright orange inflatables, connected by lines and spread ...

Ecologists compared maps produced before World War I to recent surveys of kelp forest in the Pacific Northwest, and found they have been relatively stable over the past century. In the early 1900s ...

The University of Chicago Library digitized rare 105-year-old maps documenting kelp forest populations to support research on the relationship between kelp populations and the environment. Handled ...

Big ol' Alaska. The state that can swallow Texas, Montana, and California with room for a New England-size dessert. The Last Frontier is vast, yet threadbare of roads. Settlements are motes on the ...

Researchers examining a century of ocean maps made an exciting discovery linking sea otter populations to kelp forests: Where sea otters thrive, so do these critical underwater habitats. The ...

The sudden absence of the sea stars has been bad news for kelp forests off the Lower 48 and has been noticeable all the way up to Alaska, where there has been a 60-80% decline in the last decade.

Sunflower sea stars — vividly colored creatures with up to 24 arms, and which can weigh as much as a small dog — once thrived along the Pacific Coast between Alaska and Baja California. Then ...

Communities monitoring the kelp beds along the B.C. coast have indicated loss, and now with the help of the British maps, the team will work to compare the ocean forests, she said.

More than 100 years later, scientists at the University of Chicago used these maps to track historical changes in the kelp forests of the Pacific Northwest. As it turned out, the original maps from ...